Airborne Maintenance & Engineering Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Air Transport Services Group, has received Supplemental Type Certification (STC) approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) modifications on Boeing 757, 767-200, and 767-300 aircraft. The Airborne solution includes many cost-saving features while minimizing aircraft downtime and upgrade expense to comply with Satellite-Based Augmentation System (S-BAS) requirements mandated by the FAA for 2025.
This new ADS-B Out certification pairs the new ACSS (Thales) Transponders, which were the first to the market and are already in production, with two Esterline/CMC CMA-5024 SBAS GPS Receivers to provide the position information to the transponders. The CMA-5024 also will prepare the aircraft for the future; LPV and GBAS are upgrades that can be added using the CMA-5024. The CMA-5024 gives the operator the best capability with more options for future growth by not only meeting FAA ADS-B mandates for 2020 but also meeting the S-BAS 2025 requirements, providing operators substantial cost savings during the upgrade and reducing overall out-of-service time per aircraft.
Airborne is bringing this approval to the marketplace to help meet global demand for the ADS-B upgrade by the FAA deadline of January 1, 2020.